Back and Forth I Go– All the Pretty Languages!

2 min read

There’s really no way around it– tutorials are time sucking entities that are making my head spin.

I went to a meetup last week, a Girl Develop It Pittsburgh meetup. It was really a social event plus computers. It was in a newly or currently gentrified part of town, the East Liberty neighborhood, where Google rests and is building nice luxury apartments for its employees. It was in a lounge called The Cloakroom. I walk in, lost because there was no sign on the door, and find a few people sitting in these cozy leather seats. First, I stopped at the door, filled out my name tag and got my swag and joined them.

We shook hands. They asked what I was working on. I told them I was a Newbie and am doing tutorials online so everything. They all, all of them, laughed. They knew. And so it goes.

There’s Treehouse, Code School, Free Code Camp, The Odin Project, one I learned about at the meetup, Learnable, LPTHW and LRTHW and I just. Can’t. Keep up. Lately I’ve been working on Free Code Camp stuff because I find it enjoyable. LPTHW is also enjoyable, but it is taking a backseat.

I really don’t know what languages I want to learn first. I hear that JavaScript is building the web and so I am learning it right now at Free Code Camp. I want to learn Python to program my Pi which is really why I started LPTHW. I don’t have focus. I hear about a new site or program and I try it out and I get hooked and forget about what I started.

I also want to start building. I have a nice forked Pen over at CodePen. I am still learning jQuery at Free Code Camp and the whole gamification of it makes it feel more rewarding. But this pen is a javascript calculator that I am playing with. I don’t know enough JavaScript to work more with it which is why I am headed to bed here at 3 am, so I can at least get up and finish the jQuery section of Free Code Camp and then start the JavaScript.

Here is what the calculator looks like. The CSS will be modified by Mark Pearyer and I will see what else I can bring to the table.